5 Weird Halloween-Themed Specials on YouTube That Are Totally Underrated

YouTube: preserving weird TV since 2005.

One of the best things about Halloween is having a full pass to sit down in front of the TV with a big bowl of candy and nostalgically revisit some of the spooky cultural touchstones of your youth.

While you might be hard pressed to find a lot of the zany kids content you once enjoyed still on the air, YouTube has managed to resurrect some of the most obscure Halloween favorites from the television grave. Here are a few of the weirdest and most charming TV segments out there:

A Disney Halloween

Forget Sleepy Hollow, “A Disney Halloween” is an amazing mashup of Disney’s most macabre and spooky characters. Narrated in part by a very unsettling live action face in the magic mirror from Snow White — who keeps championing the evil villains of Disney’s films — it’s a fun collection of clips that ran on TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

This entire TV series is basically Halloween-themed. A truly bizarro Canadian kids show that originally aired in the ‘70s, The Hilarious House of Frightenstein was made up of strange, goofy sketches using classic horror movie tropes, and features the king of fright himself, Vincent Price.

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Betty Boop “Minnie the Moocher”

In this spooky Betty Boop episode, Betty has a fight with her parents and runs away from home with her bff Bimbo. They take shelter in a cave where the walrus ghost of Cab Calloway — yes, that’s what I said — and a bunch of his ghoulish friends perform the song “Mini the Moocher.” Max Fleischer, who created Betty Boop, actually animated the walrus over a film of Cab Calloway dancing, giving the creepy cartoon a weirdly human quality. It’s a psychedelic segment that has to be seen to be believed.

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The Halloween Tree

A big favorite for a lot of ’90’s kids, The Halloween Tree was a feature length animated caper based on a Ray Bradbury book of the same name. The film follows a group of trick or treating kids who end up going on an adventurous quest with a creepy time traveler played by Leonard Nemoy, who takes them through the history of Halloween.

Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show

Not technically a Halloween special, but really should have been, Alice Cooper guest stars on The Muppet Show in a series of musical skits with the whole muppet crew. Unfortunately, the entire episode is not available on YouTube, but excellent musical bits and pieces of this 1978 episode will get you in a ghoulish spirit.